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cover of episode TinySeed Tales S2E2 | Moving Upmarket

TinySeed Tales S2E2 | Moving Upmarket

2020/9/17
logo of podcast Startups For the Rest of Us

Startups For the Rest of Us

Shownotes Transcript

Brian & Scottie Elliott are the husband & wife co-founders of Gather), an interior design project management app.

On this episode, Rob chats with Brian & Scottie about taking their product upmarket, focusing on customer success, hiring consultants and contractors, and more!

The topics we cover

[01:43] Check in on how this week has been going

	- Setting things in motion with some new hires

	- MRR now growing off the chain but feeling good about accomplishments

	- Shifting focus from growing while also building out process

	- MRR growth is not everything

[04:50] Scottie talks about hiring

	- Looking at three potential hires right now: lead gen, VA, and an industry expert

	- Consultant vs contractor. A contract shows up and performs a task, a consultant is an expert in the industry

	- Moving from task-based hires to project-based hires

	- With Tinyseed funding now have the opportunity to do more hiring

[08:59] New business processes

	- Scottie was initially doing customer support

	- Now realizing needing to focus on customer success to help make sure the customer is successful

[10:21] Challenging sales cycles and losing an enterprise deal

	- Had a potential enterprise deal (40-50 seats) but the contract was pulled last minute based on the price

	- The contract eventually went to 0 and the client ghosted Scottie & Brian

	- Losing contracts is disappointing, but they'll continue to reach out until they get a "no".

	- Going to dig into the "why" to understand if it was pricing, or something else.

	- Founders need to decide between learning or hiring for specific skill sets

	- Important to have a sales process in place before handing off to an outsider

	- Lots of institutional knowledge within a business and sales process that needs to be documented

[17:57] Technical setbacks from the week

	- They had a complicated new feature about to ship when one of their developers raised an issue that ended up setting them back nearly a week.

Links from the show

	- [TinySeed Tales Season 2 Episode 1](https://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/tinyseed-tales/tinyseed-tales-season-2-episode-1-introducing-gather))

	- [Gather](https://gatherit.co/)) | Website

	- [Brian Elliott](https://twitter.com/brianleeelliott)) | Twitter

Thanks for listening to another episode of TinySeed Tales. If you haven't already, be sure to check out Season 1 of TinySeed Tales where we follow the SaaS journey with Craig Hewitt of Castos.